In Middle School a friend of mine used to go into empty classrooms and write a message on the blackboard for the next class to discover: “The bugs will inherit the earth.” For a generation brought up on apocalyptic Cold War fears and science fiction, that was darkly amusing. But it turns out, he was an optimist.

The Washington Post recently reported that a team of international biologists studying European insect populations announced in 2014 that in the last 35 years invertebrate populations — bees, beetles, etc. — had declined forty-five percent. Last year, a similar study in Germany discovered an insect decline over the previous decade of seventy-six percent.

And now, the National Academy of Sciences has announced a similar decline in America. The biomass of invertebrates since 1976 here may be down seventy-five percent. Pesticides and emergent pathogens probably play some part, but around the world there is a consensus that climate change is also implicated. Tropical creatures, for instance, are adapted to a narrow climate range. Bugs suddenly subjected to a hotter climate may not be able to regulate their own body heat or lay eggs.

One might be inclined to say, who cares? What’s a bug ever done for me? The answer is, more than you know. Thirty-five percent of the world’s plant crops require bees, wasps and other pollinators to thrive. When pollinators die, the fruits, vegetables and other food stuffs we depend on are in trouble. Invertebrates also aerate he soil, recycle dead organic matter, and so on.

Insectivores, including many lizards and birds, feed on bugs, and now some lizard species have declined by 30 percent and some bird populations by 90 percent. So the death of arthropods, butterflies, bees, centipedes, spiders, grasshoppers, moths isn’t occurring in isolation.Next are those they feed, and up the food chain to animals we care about —like us.

There is a pattern here. Coral is dying and the reefs are incubators of sea life. Lightning bugs no longer illuminate the summer evenings. The seas are being denuded of fish. The great chain of being is losing one link after another. Something is killing these lifeforms, and the something is us and our creations.

In “The War of the Worlds,” H.G. Wells posited a Martian invasion brought low by pathogens too tiny to see. If a species sits in pride and arrogance at the top of the food chain, it may seen inconceivable that the loss of a bug can lead in time to their starvation, but it is an all too familiar process.

Sooner or later we will discover that the ladder of life that we imagine we sit securely atop depends on all the rungs. Since we are systematically seeing through the one’s below us, as if we were the Wile E. Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon, our perch is becoming precarious.

We are about to learn not just that pride goeth before a fall, but that in an interconnected web of existence no species is an island. The bell that tolls for the bees and beetles, the fish at sea and in the polluted lakes and rivers, the creatures of the filthy land and toxic air, tolls for you and me.

If it is possible to commit careless, feckless, oblivious suicide, our species is doing so. Getting and spending, we will end in a poverty of life where once abundance fed our every need. If there were to be survivors of the apocalypse we are crafting, they could easily chart the missteps leading to our demise. They’d find plenty of villains, foolish decisions, inflection points, but on a ruined planet devoid of life there will be no one to conduct the post mortem, and no one to write or read an obituary. The bugs will not inherit the earth. We have set in motion a process that will produce a planet with no heirs apparent.

It may not be too late to change. But hair-on-fire warnings have recently been sounded. Climate change is accelerating. There may be only a decade left in which to reverse the process. Huge changes in our behavior would be required. In response to this alarming news, did the subject become an burning issue in the midterm elections? Are leaders around the world racing to adapt? Are corporations that profit from the status quo rethinking their plans? Are consumers changing their lifestyles?

You know the answers. Alas, if the planet is a vast living computer, it is infected with a virus. It doesn’t need to be debugged. It needs to be dehumaned. Yet the hardest advice for our species to follow is the present imperative. We must change or die.